The stories behind the buildings, statues and other points of interest that make Manhattan fascinating.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

An Unlikely Pie-Shaped Solution -- Nos. 87-97 Kenmare Street

The magnificent Williamsburg Bridge opened on December 19,
1903 to much fanfare.What the city
planners had not anticipated was the traffic congestion on the old, narrow
streets that the new bridge would cause.To relieve the condition, a four-block roadway connecting Delancey
Street to Marion Street (later renamed Cleveland Place in honor of the former
President), was planned.

The new street would cut directly through the middle of
existing blocks and necessitate the razing of existing buildings.One of these was the three-story hotel at No.
15 Marion Street owned by Brooklynite real estate operator Augusta Liebertz.

When the demolition crews had finished,
Augusta found that she was left with an unlikely sliver of property.

Kenmare Street was named for the birthplace in Ireland of Tammany
Hall boss “Big Tim” Sullivan’s mother.The thoroughfare would not open officially until 1911, but Augusta
Liebertz would not wait that long to develop her sliver.

She had an existing relationship with the
architectural firm of B. W. Berger & Son. Augusta's now-deceased husband, Peter, had first began building in the
area in the 1880s. She continued building and operating properties and Bruno W. Berger & Son had designed her $15,000
business building nearby on Delancey Street in 1906.

She now presented the firm with a seemingly impossible site. It was a mere 3-1/2 feet wide on
Marion Street, stretching back nearly 100 feet on Kenmare where it widened to
19 feet—a narrow, pie-shaped lot.Triangular
properties were popularly called “flatirons” at the time (a name that would
become permanently branded onto the famous 1902 Fuller Building on 23rd
Street).On June 20, 1908 the New-York
Tribune reported on “Plans for a Little ‘Flatiron.”

The Real Estate Record
& Guide reported the cost of the projected three-story loft building at
$16,000—about $425,000 in 2015.The
Tribune added it “will be of ornamental brick, with large mezzanine windows
on the plaza front.The ground floor
will be fitted out as a café and the upper stories as lofts.”

Viewed from Cleveland Place, the structure appears little wider than three feet.

B. W. Berger & Sons filled the quirky plot with a rather attractive structure clad in beige brick on the upper two floors--a mix of Colonial and Classical Revival styles. A slightly-protruding store front housed a café
in the front and an auto garage in the wider, rear section.Five sets of stacked three-sided bays
projected from the façade, giving the interior space a few extra feet.A cast metal cornice topped it off.

The building sat within what was termed the “Italian
District.” Although it was located just a block north of the newly-completed Police Headquarters, during Prohibition the immediate neighborhood
was called the “whisky curb market” because of the heavy bootlegging activity
of gangsters.The ground floor
restaurant would soon become a favorite haunt of Italian crime figures.

At its eastern end, the building widened to 19 feet.

A few years earlier, in 1907, Giuseppe Alfano had been
arrested and charged with extortion.He had sent threatening letters, signed by the “Black Hand,” to junk
dealer Dominick Montmarano.According to
The New York Times on August 25, Montmarano, who was threatened with death, was
“induced to part with $30, as an installment of $800 demanded.”He marked the cash before handing it off to
Alfano and his accomplice, Maria Varone.The pair had the bills on them when arrested.

Now, Giuseppe Alfano ran the restaurant in the Kenmare
Street building; whileThe Michigan Tire &
Tube Works operated in the rear section.The café would play a major part in a gangland shooting on July 16,
1920.Three days earlier two Italian
gangsters had a violent fight over a woman in the restaurant.It would have fatal consequences for one of
them.

At 2:45 a.m. on July 16 a seven-passenger Cadillac limousine
pulled up to Bellevue Hospital.The
New-York Tribune identified the passengers as “a woman who gave her name as
Loretta LeRoy,” her chauffeur Wilson Jackson, and “Pasquale Dimara, an Italian.”Also in the car was a bullet-ridden body.

The three were detained by police and Lorette LeRoy gave a
simple explanation.“In her story to the
police, Miss LeRoy said that she was being driven home by her chauffeur…when
they noticed the body of a man lying in front of 87 Kenmare Street.Demira [sic] she said, was standing near the
body.”

Police described the location as “a small Italian
restaurant.”Policeman Stabwitz, who had
been on duty nearby, heard five shots and rushed to the scene.The body had already been removed and the
restaurant was closed.But on the steps
leading to the cellar he found two shotguns, both loaded and both recently
fired.

Loretta (who was “expensively clad and wore many jewels")
told police she got out of the car and Dimara told her the man had been shot
and was dying.He and Jackson loaded the
man into the limo and headed to the hospital.While she spoke, detectives were outside searching her limousine where they
found a loaded 38 caliber revolver with none if its chambers fired.

The dead man had been shot five times in the chest.He was described by police as “well-dressed,
is about twenty-five years old and about five feet eight inches in height.He wore a large diamond stud in his shirt
front.”The Tribune noted he “is
believed to be a wealthy Italian.”

Further investigation revealed a guitar case in the
restaurant’s basement.And when
detectives went to the address given by Loretta LeRoy, they were told that no
one by that name lived there.

The following day the New-York Tribune reported that “Men of
the Italian squad…began yesterday to unravel the tangled threads of the East
Side feud that reached its climax yesterday morning before a dingy little
restaurant at 87 Kenmare Street.”

The victim had been identified as Alfredo Grassiano who had
been released from jail four months earlier.He had served three other sentences for burglary and truck thievery.His body was identified by his father who
said “his son never came home except to extort money from his family.”

Not only was the accused assassin, Jerry Ruberto, who was
known as Jerry the Wolf, arrested but so were the restaurant’s owner,
Guiseppe Alfano; and the three seeming good Samaritans of the night before.Loretta Leroy, incidentally, was really Kitty
Flynn; and Pasquale Dimara was Pasquale De Fina, whose alias was Patsy
Gans.The second woman, known only as “Buster,”
was missing.

Kitty, “who says she is a cabaret singer in an uptown
Chinese restaurant,” changed her story.She said she and Buster had a double date with Grassiano and De
Fina.They arrived at the restaurant and
“presently, she told the police De Fina and Grassiano joined her and ‘Buster’
and chatted for a few minutes, when Grassiano said ‘It’s hot.I want fresh air.”

Seconds later five shots rang out.Kitty Flynn’s chauffeur said she came running
out, screaming “Mike! Mike! Why did you go out?” and they loaded Grassiano into
the automobile and left.“In the
confusion ‘Buster’ vanished,” reported the Tribune.

“All of the witnesses held insist that Grassiano had no
enemies and none of the can think of any reason why anyone should have tried to
kill him,” said the newspaper.Jerry the
Wolf “admitted having a fight with Grassiano in the restaurant three days
before the killing, and admitted that Grassiano had smashed a bottle over his
head.He denied knowledge of the murder,”
reported The Sun on July 18.

Jerry Ruberto had other things to contend with at the same
time. The 22-year old, convicted twice
for felonious assault, was on $1,000 bail awaiting trial for firing several
revolver shots from an automobile at a pedestrian on Coney Island a month
earlier.

Jerry the Wolf would meet his end two years later during a
shootout in the Café Venezia at the corner of Kenmare and Elizabeth
Streets.On February 24, 1922 The New
York Times noted “Another name was added yesterday morning to the list of
killings in the feud among bootleggers connected with the ‘whisky curb market,’
near Police Headquarters." Jerry Ruberto’s
name was added to the string of more than 30 other mob murders at the time.

By 1926 Giuseppe Alfano’s restaurant had been replaced with
a cigar store owned by Julius Siebert.It would be the cause of disappointment to Mrs. Louis Rosenberg on June 3
that year.She and her husband, a shirt
manufacturer, had planned a night at the theater.Not long before the 8:00 curtain, Rosenberg
ducked into the cigar store to telephone his wife to meet him so they could go
to the theater together.

Unaware that someone was in the telephone booth in his
store, Julius Siebert finished his business, closed the store, and went
home.The following day The Times wrote
that Rosenberg had “two tickets for the theatre last night, but he did not use
them.Instead he spent the time that the
first act was on inside of a locked cigar store at 87 Kenmare Street.”

The neighborhood had not appreciably improved by the Great
Depression.In 1939 the Works Progress Administration’s
New York City Guide noted “The building of the Williamsburg and Manhattan
bridges cut swathes through the close-packed dwellings,” and that recently
Government housing had replaced some of the old tenements.“But throughout most of the section the
smothering heat of summer still drives East Siders to the windows and fire
escapes of their ill-ventilated dwellings, to the docks along the river or to
the crowded smelly streets where half-naked children cool themselves in streams
from the fire hydrants.”

Nevertheless, when the Kenmare Street building was sold in
June 1944, the tax valuation for the peculiarly-shaped
building was $10,000, or about $135,000 in 2015.

And change would come to Kenmare Street.In the late 1970s a tire repair shop was
still located in the back of the building; and upstairs residents were taking
over the former lofts.Street photographer
Robert Herman lived in a full floor, which he described as having a “gas space
heater hanging from the ceiling” and “In the winter, even with duct tape
covering all the cracks in the window moldings, the Con Ed bill was higher than
my $250 a month rent.”

But when Storefront for Art and Architecture art gallery took
the ground level space around 1984, it heralded the beginning of the discovery
of this section of Soho.Simultaneously,
the old Police Headquarters building underwent a $20 million residential
conversion—home to names like Leonardo DiCaprio, Calvin Klein and Stefi Graff.

A current apartment in the building narrows to 18"--a decorating challenge. photograph courtesy of Joanne Mariner

On August 22, 2010 Stefanie Cohen of the New York Post wrote
“Just four blocks long, Kenmare Street was once a lonely extension of Delancey
Street, home to automechanics, psychics and bodegas. A nowhere-man’s land between Little Italy,
Chinatown and SoHo. But in the last
year, the street has transformed from a sleepy thoroughfare to a strip dotted
with nightclubs and fine dining, after-hours lounges and high-end eateries.”

Today Augusta Liebertz’s solution to her left-over slice of
property is little changed on the upper floors.The remarkable ground floor of movable panels installed by Storefront
for Art and Architecture and desiged by Stephen Holl & Vito Acconci is a work of art in itself.The stark contrast between the two sections
is a comment on the building’s drastically changed location and history.

non-credited photographs by the authormany thanks to Joanne Mariner for suggesting this post